How can I fine-tune white balance to match how a scene actually looks to my eyes?
Asked 5/18/2015
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A white sheet of paper lit by a household bulb does not look as neutral to me as it does in daylight, but it also does not look as orange as it would with no white-balance correction at all. Our vision seems to partly adapt to the light source rather than fully correcting it. If I set camera white balance so the paper renders pure white, the photo often looks less like the room actually appeared. Is there a practical way to fine-tune white balance to better match human perception, similar to using exposure compensation for metering?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
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Just because the paper is white does not necessarily mean that it appears to be white in the image. Your camera can only see the light that is reflected towards it.
It's essentially the same "problem" that you have with measuring the amount of light to find the correct exposure.
- You never know if what you see is a bright object that is in low light, or a dark object in a lot of light.
- You never know if what you see is a green object that is in white light, or a white object in green light.
The available solutions to this problem caused by receiving only the reflected light from the subject are:
- eyball it In the digital age, this is what a lot of people use for either one. Take a few test shots until the exposure looks correct. Take a few more until the colors stop looking funky and the white balance is ok. If shooting raw, you have a lot freedom to adjust the exposure in post and even more so to adjust the white balance.
- meter it There are exposure meters that allow you to measure the amount of light before it bounces off the subject. This is useful in studio, to dial in ratios between different light sources. Yes, there are also color meters that allow you to measure the white balance/color of light. They are expensive (>1k$) and not as common as exposure meters. They are useful to keep color white balance consistent across many images or in video productions. You don't want everything to look like bathed in the light of the sunset just because that bulb in your flash or video light slowly decayed over the course of the production and changed its color.
There is no such thing as a correct white balance just like there's no correct exposure either. You have to adjust both to recreated the vision that you perceived when you took the photograph. How exactly you are with that is your creative freedom.
Originally by user35348. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user35348
11y ago
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There is no fully objective setting for this, because the camera only records reflected light and cannot know whether it is seeing a white object in colored light or a colored object in neutral light. Human vision also adapts only partially and contextually, so “what it looked like” is subjective.
In practice, white balance fine-tuning is much like exposure compensation: start from a reasonable baseline, then adjust by eye until the result matches your memory of the scene. Taking test shots and nudging the result is a normal approach.
A useful method is to treat white balance as a blend between two believable reference points rather than aiming for a mathematically neutral white. For mixed light, you can move between two known-correct balances for the two illuminants. For strongly colored artificial light, you might blend between a full technical correction and a familiar baseline such as daylight. This often produces a result closer to human perception than forcing every white object to render perfectly neutral.
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